Institute Students at Work in El Salvador and Sierra Leone This January

January 4, 2010

This January, two teams of Monterey Institute students are putting the skills they are learning in Monterey to use in the far corners of the globe, working on faculty-sponsored projects in El Salvador and Sierra Leone. These projects are part of the Institute’s curriculum offerings for “J-term,” the January interim period between fall and spring semesters.

The Team Monterey El Salvador Development Practicum is now in its fourth year. On January 3, 16 students and faculty sponsor Professor Adele Negro traveled to Ciudad Romero, El Salvador, where they will spend the next three weeks working on a variety of development projects in collaboration with local Salvadoran agencies. Institute alumnus Nathan Weller (MAIEP ’08) greeted the team in his role as program and policy director for the Foundation for Self Sufficiency of Central America. You can follow Team El Savador’s progress in real time via their blog.

The Challenges in Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone Practicum brings 13 students and faculty sponsor Professor Pushpa Iyer to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where they are studying firsthand the ongoing efforts at peacebuilding in the West African nation. Sierra Leone continues to struggle to build a stable civil society after experiencing more than a decade of civil war leading up to United Nations intervention in 2002. You can follow the 2010 Sierra Leone practicum’s progress in real time via their blog.

Look for more on these projects and their outcomes in the Winter 2010 issue of the Communiqué, coming in early March.